I wished I could take some of the sadness off her hands, like a vine full of overripe tomatoes or the proverbial cup of sugar. As a teacher of memoir writing, I am aware of secondary PTSD. Therapists advise I set good boundaries with students and take time out for self-care. I do, but human lives overlap. The boundaries in my building are thin walls and a few barred windows.
A vote may have been “about” the economy, but it legitimized xenophonia, oppression, and suppression of the truth. It legitimized the KKK and climate deniers and the HB2 bathroom bill and rape on college campuses and racist rhetoric on the playground. It elevated hate to the highest office in the land, and that will come for us all.
The ebb and flow of her needs, the in and out game she plays, is how I know her best. Before, she lived her life nice, then mean, then apologetic. She was beautiful, then ugly. Calm, then chaotic. A swinging pendulum of emotions. A rolling coaster of twisting and turning, first up, then down, then finally looping back to the ground.
Yet even thousands of miles apart, we found ways to lie in bed together. We talked on the phone, and I cradled the receiver like it was his chest under my ear, his gentle voice buzzing me to sleep.
I was literally forced by my body to stop running. Stop running from my emotional pain. From my repressed past. From the truth about incompatible relationships and jobs. From my demons and skeletons and my shadow.
And one night at Nana’s house, Jessica locked herself in the bathroom. She thought everyone was sleeping. I heard her go and my eyes opened wide like street lamps, I was scared, so I snuck out of bed, crept to the bathroom door.
In the aftermath of the election I was angry, not because of who people voted for, but because people were quickly trying to discount the very real fears of communities who could not be sure if they were included in this new vision of America.
I’m fifty-three years old and am floating naked in a rock pool filled with cold water from the Tasman Sea. The low tide has exposed large slabs of black volcanic rock—basalt scoria with frozen-in-time bubbles of Miocene-era lava gas. The rocks shelter me from the open sea.
Recently I was talking to a therapist friend who specializes in LBGTQ teens. I told her what was going on, but said I was skeptical. I was expecting her to talk me down, and tell me why it’s important that my husband and I embrace J’s declarations and enable her.
After a manic night that saw a couple of emergency surgeries, my eye pressure started dropping slowly but steadily the next morning. The doctor cleared me of the crisis but warned it will take at least 2 weeks and five eye drops every 15 minutes to restore my vision fully.
After a plane fell from the sky and broke into pieces, I spent four weeks seeing my family completely devastated and yet somehow still functioning through the magic icing of togetherness. I witnessed my mother deliver a powerful eulogy titled “Shattered but still whole.”
